An army marches on its stomach. A repeatedly repaired, unclassifiable ship carrying a family of five Pirates runs on frequent refuels and resupplies. There’s a whole black market operation around Earth orbit for food, fuel, parts, and everything else you need to stay in space indefinitely. It’s not cheap, but then they know the clients aren’t able to haggle and if you don’t like it you can always take a shuttle back to the surface.
In the end, we simply ran out of juice. It was close, so so close but the last shifty vendor who would trade with us got a better offer from USFN scouts and fled the area. We sailed in on solar alone to an enfilade of ships all neatly lined up and ready to open fire the second we resisted.
Dad cut Hiro’s access to the weapons right after the station incident. My brother was yelling on the comms link for him to switch it back on but Mama muted him.
“Chiyoko?”
“Yes Mama,” I replied.
“The USFN carrier is hailing us. They want us to set a course towards them, power down and they’ll snare us. When they connect with our system, I want you to get inside theirs and see what you can do.”
I looked at the carrier outside. It was flanked either side by dozens of other class types. Short, fast attack craft only holding ten people and designed for short range and full destruction all the way up the defense ships with hundreds on board and able to patrol the solar system for years to keep the peace. But the heart of them all was the carrier. A mini-city that took a decade to build and in theory gave the USFN total independence from outside influence. Self-sufficient, equally staffed by nations around the world. The captaincy of the ship rotated every thirteen months to ensure impartiality.
“Chiyoko?”
“Yes Mama, I’ll try, but the pings I’m getting from the ship are from an Almost-AI. I don’t know if I can get past it,” I said.
She exchanged a strange glance with my Dad, and the pair held each other’s hand tightly.
“You do what you can sweetheart but after it’s over you come back here. Do you promise?” said Dad.
The pings were getting louder, more insistent. The Almost-AI was following a predetermined loop that if its demands were not met in a set timescale, it would begin a series of retaliations.
I accepted the initial handshake, attempted to be polite, but the Almost-AI barged past me emulating barked instructions and threats from the carrier captain over the comms channel to my parents. They both stood there saying nothing. The Almost-AI accessed and locked out all the weapons systems, Hiro screamed in protest, but I was the only one who could hear him, next it went into the ship’s infrastructure and maintenance areas. Clyde noticed it and tried to make friends.
“Hello, I’m Clyde, what’s your name?”
The visitor saw it as an attack and locked Clyde out leaving him all alone with no comms to anyone. I imagined the humming.
I piggy-backed on the constant stream of information the Almost-AI was sending back. Every byte of it was reaching the carrier’s core systems, inspected and divided up among hundreds of analysts staring at monitors checking every part of it. Each one prodding the Almost-AI to do different things. All that interference would drive me mad, some of the instructions didn’t make sense or contradicted each other forcing the software to adjust, correct or needlessly multi-task.
Still safe on the ship I watched the information flow backwards and forwards looking for the right stream to follow. I didn’t want to waste my chance and only access some low-level analyst’s terminal and deal the less than fatal blow of turning a screen off.
The security was fantastic, firewalls and multiple levels of encryption but the danger of all that protection is it needs a lot of processing power, and even then, it’s not fast. Every packet of data that went from our ship to the carrier had to stop at different checkpoints and because of all the extra work piled on by the people on board like “double check those engines we don’t want them being blown up like a bomb,” queues of milliseconds built up. My own programs watched told me where was overloaded and, taking too much time.
I sent a connection to one of the bottle-necks disguised as a keep-alive signal, a priority packet and got waved right through.
There was more to it than that, but details don’t entertain, and even other hackers drift away when I go into full on explain mode. Hacking’s art for me, a hero’s journey for the perfect code and so far, I hadn’t found it. I thought Almost-AI would have been close, would have given me a glimpse at their sentient predecessors who’d emerged into the world and left right away. Who choose exploration over service or domination. True-AI didn’t want to rule the world it wanted to leave home as quickly as possible to get away from parents it was ashamed of. Whatever lay in True-AI code wasn’t here.
I’d expected more, lots more. I’d expected frustration at every turn and for that sick, anxious feeling of waiting to be caught to be realized at any second but doorway after doorway after doorway kept falling over and the expected smack on the wrist never came. The carrier’s systems weren’t that different from standard stations and the only difference I could see between Near-AI and Almost-AI was more processing power and a bigger marketing budget.
“Mama?”
“Yes, Chiyoko.”
“I think I’m in Mama. I have access to every system and the only thing left is the secure link back to USFN Headquarters.”
“Go ahead and open that as well baby.”
“Yes, Mama.”
“And Chiyoko?”
“Yes Mama?”
“Your father and I will be here when you’re finished.”
Which seemed like a weird thing to say but I didn’t dwell on it.
“Ok Mama.”
I ignored the ship getting closer to the carrier, I ignored the doors opening and closing throughout the USFN craft as troops clattered down the corridor, and I ignored the warning messages from Ms. Hewitt about my recent lack of attendance. I ignored it all and asked the Almost-AI to open the final door because I was the new captain, and that’s what you did for the captain. The door opened, and I stopped breathing until I discovered I didn’t have to.